Chris Matthews Complete Library E-book Box Set: Tip and the Gipper, Jack Kennedy, Hardball, Kennedy & Nixon, Now, Let Me Tell You What I Really Think, and American

by Matthews, Chris

  Tip O’Neill had a favorite phrase for this principle: “All politics is local.” If you want to understand how a politician behaves, look at what affects him at home, back where his voters are. Politicians use the same hard-nosed approach in dealing with one another: if you want to hurt someone, hit him where it matters to him the most, in his own backyard.

  Charles W. Colson, Richard Nixon’s most intimate political confidant, was himself a firm believer in the rule. The man known for fierce political dedication—“I would walk over my grandmother if necessary to help Richard Nixon”—also had a keen sense of political motivation. “When you have ’em by the balls,” he once observed, “their hearts and minds will follow.”

  Colson’s language and sensibility might stand some refinement, but the logic is unassailable. People look at public issues through the prism of their own welfare. They may care passionately about the starving in Ethiopia, but their votes ride closer to their own stomachs. As Harry Truman used to say, “It’s a recession when your neighbor loses his job; it’s a depression when you lose yours.” The veteran pol worries about the neighbors back home. He keeps his eye on the mundane world of those who elect him. The intellectual thinks wholesale, studying public life in all its mighty design; as we saw with Lyndon Johnson, the veteran pol has a penchant for retail, one customer at a time.

  When Congressman William J. Hughes of New Jersey won his first election, back in 1974, he began holding “town meetings” to keep in touch with the people at home. At the first such meeting, held in his home area of Salem County, the freshly minted legislator opened with a statement of his congressional duties. “I represent you at the federal level,” he said. “I don’t take care of your potholes. I don’t pick up your trash.”

  When it came time for questions, a woman in the first row raised her hand insistently. “Well, I want to tell you,” she began, “they’re supposed to pick up my trash on Thursday afternoons and they never do and the dogs get into it.”

  “You know, madam, as I indicated to you, I’m a federal legislator,” Hughes told her. “I work on the federal budget and national issues. And what you should do is contact either your mayor or your local commissioner of public works.”

  Without a hint of sarcasm, the woman looked her hot new congressman directly in the eye and said, “I didn’t want to start that high.”

  If there exists a sacrament of baptism in the secular world of politics, it is administered in such public moments as this. The cold water of truth is splashed in the face of every young pol: you don’t tell people what to worry about; they tell you.

  Sometimes the “All politics is local” admonition gets delivered with a vengeance.

  Back in 1970, old Congressman Edward J. Patten, from the other end of New Jersey, faced what outsiders thought was a tough primary challenge by a well-connected antiwar candidate. The septuagenarian incumbent, hopelessly bucking the tides of opinion on the Vietnam War issue, had one thing going for him: his opponent wasn’t a “local” fellow.

  Just as the primary campaign was getting under way, Eddie Patten ran an ad in the local newspaper. It was nothing fancy, just a reprint from the Manhattan telephone directory with his primary opponent’s name and West End Avenue address circled. The challenger was out of the race before he had even unpacked his carpetbag.

  Ten years later, the people of Oregon presented the same harsh accounting, this time to a veteran incumbent. Al Ullman, chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, should have held the seat for life. He had attained great status and power among Washington movers and shakers. Unfortunately, he did not spend enough time back home in the Great Northwest. He was attacked by his Republican opponent for (a) no longer owning a home in the district and (b) having made only six visits to the district the previous year. Ullman shot back that he had been back home “ten” times. In the age of jet travel, when most congressmen get back to the district every other week, Ullman’s defense was a flop.

  Some of the great names in modern American politics—J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, Frank Church of Idaho, Albert Gore, Sr., of Tennessee, father of the future vice president, are the first that come to mind—met similar rejection when the people sensed that their young hopeful had done more than make good in Washington, D.C.: he had caught himself a bad case of Potomac fever, becoming more familiar in the salons of Georgetown than in the meeting halls back home.

  The smarter professional never lets this happen. It’s not so much that he makes sure to come home often enough; it’s that he gives people the sense that he never left town in the first place.

  Lawton Chiles, the longtime senator from Florida, rejected the well-tailored dark blue suits so fashionable in D.C. “When I dress like that,” he once told a staff member, “no one comes up to me at the airport to say hello.” That’s why Chiles wore country-cut suits. The man who won election by walking the length of Florida wanted to remain in appearance as in reality the same fellow the folks elected.

  Without necessarily knowing it, the Florida Senator was observing a basic political tenet first publicized by Niccolò Machiavelli in 1513. Machiavelli warned future politicians, in The Prince, to stay close to the people they are ruling. If the politician is “present, in person, he can discover disorders in the bud and prevent them from developing,” he wrote almost five centuries ago, “but if he is at a distance in some remote part, they come to him only by hearsay and thus, when they are got to a head, are commonly incurable.”

  In 1981 Congressman John Breaux of Louisiana offered a more outrageous display of the “All politics is local” rule. He confessed to a reporter that he had been influenced to support the Reagan Administration’s historic tax and budget policies with the promise of higher price supports for sugar, a major product of his state. Asked whether his vote could be bought, he replied brightly, “No, but it can be rented.” The idiom and the ethic were appreciated back in Louisiana. Congressman Breaux is now Senator Breaux.

  Throughout my years of working among politicians, at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, I have never met anyone more attuned to the “All politics is local” rule than the man who coined it. Unlike “the Great Communicator,” Ronald Reagan, who projected his strength through television, Tip O’Neill practiced his brand of politics face-to-face, one person at a time.

  Also, one enemy at a time.

  In 1982 a young lawyer for a Massachusetts utility company, with the politically appealing name of Frank McNamara, decided to challenge Speaker Tip O’Neill for reelection, financing his campaign with a million dollars raised from oil interests in Oklahoma and Texas who had little love for the old liberal who had long supported price controls. A bad mistake. In an old industrial region that had long suffered hard winters and harder fuel bills, “Dallas” can be a fightin’ word.

  To seize press attention, the challenger declared his candidacy on the steps of the U.S. Capitol. As the media event got under way, several young men wearing ten-gallon hats passed through the crowd handing out some relevant literature. “You May Not Know Frank McNamara, but They Know Him in Dallas” read the cover. Attached were the news clips of Mr. McNamara’s glittery Texas fund-raiser. The next morning’s Boston Globe contained a short account of the McNamara announcement—but not too short to do full devastating justice to the scene-stealing Stetson hats and the young candidate’s oil connection.

  The “All politics is local” rule applies just as much in Peoria as it does in Cambridge. A few months later, in the homestretch of the same ’82 congressional elections, Tip O’Neill brought a $1 billion jobs bill to the House floor. Republicans mocked the measure as an election-year gimmick. No one was tougher on the Democrats’ top man than the House Republican leader, Robert H. Michel of Illinois.

  Initially, O’Neill had hoped to avoid any one-to-one combat with his friend Michel. But when Michel tore into the bill as the worst sort of Democratic boondoggle, the Speaker’s staff did some quick research. Courtesy of a helpful local office, we dug
up some useful information about conditions in the Republican leader’s backyard in Peoria.

  Taking the House floor, O’Neill began reading the names and street locations of the bridges in Peoria that were below Illinois state safety standards, each of which would be eligible for repair under the proposed jobs bill the Republicans had been attacking as “make-work,” another damned New Deal leaf-raking bill.

  As the Speaker read his litany of hazard areas into the record, his words were carried via cable TV directly into the Republican leader’s district. Minutes before, Michel had been playing the grand and dutiful role of national party spokesman. Now he was in a local damage-control mode. Red-faced, he stood in the back of the House chamber giving frantic instructions to his press secretary. It’s one thing to be a team player for the national party; it’s another to expose yourself to a hard political shot that will be playing that night in Peoria. By hitting his rival where he lived, O’Neill translated a wholesale debate over national economic policy to the local, retail level.

  O’Neill’s most illustrious predecessor was equally adept at this. Short, bald Sam Rayburn was no matinee idol. They don’t carve his epigrams onto dams and high schools. But his quiet capacity to deal with congressman after congressman, again and again, turned the mob scene of the House floor into a disciplined army carrying laws and policies that had seemed unachievable. Almost without effort, he could hit members where they lived. “Sam Rayburn could make a call and the Army Corps of Engineers would go to work,” Tip O’Neill would reminisce. “Rayburn would take care of the little detail of an appropriation later.”

  The legendary Texan was thought to wield the same clout with less benign federal agencies. A call from Rayburn might get the IRS auditors working with the same determination as those Army Corps of Engineers bulldozers. Nervous House members could never know for sure whether or not Rayburn ever actually exploited that power, but they lived in fear of it.

  Dan Rostenkowski, longtime chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, was another true believer in the power of political self-interest. The 1986 tax reform bill was greased along a two-track legislative system. First, the members voted on the bill. Next, they got to vote on the “transition rules,” the provisions determining when the various tax changes kicked in, with a tremendous impact on particular industries and regions. Practically every member of Congress had an interest in ensuring that his local industry was given the best possible consideration. Those transition rules put hundreds of trump cards into the hands of Dan Rostenkowski. If a particular corporation became liable for a new tax January 1 rather than three months earlier, on October 1, it could save millions. Similarly, if a tax was to be eliminated, far better that it be eliminated earlier. Members who supported Rosty’s position on tax reform could obviously expect a warmer hearing on such matters than someone who had not. Rosty knew this; the members knew it. And so did the corporate lobbyists who might have been thinking of opposing the chairman’s reform efforts.

  Political amateurs make the common mistake of treating all people the same. The great pol does not make this mistake. He keeps his eyes on the exact pressure point that will get the job done.

  In 1940, a Promethean test of wills occurred between two American giants, each with his own agenda. On one side was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a man who had overcome polio to become the most powerful and dynamic president of the twentieth century. In office for two terms, FDR wanted an unprecedented third. One of the critics of his bid was his ambassador to Great Britain, Joseph P. Kennedy, father of a future president and a political dynasty. The climactic episode came just before the November election. Kennedy had staked out a bold public position against a third term. He was dead set against Roosevelt’s collaboration with Britain and his apparent determination to bring the United States into the war against Germany. Kennedy, an Irish-American with no fondness for the British, felt that FDR was not only bringing America into a terrible world conflict but bringing us in on the losing side.

  “It has long been a theory of mine that it is unproductive for the democratic and dictator countries to widen the division now existing between them by emphasizing their differences,” Kennedy had said. “After all, we have to live together in the same world whether we like it or not.” He had made this committed isolationist, “appeasing” statement in London three weeks after Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister, signed the infamous Munich Pact with Adolf Hitler.

  Roosevelt saw his opportunity. If he could bring a critic like Kennedy around, he could go a long way toward soothing a nation justly and increasingly fearful of war.

  Even for the great FDR, his manipulation of the Irish-American tycoon was breathtaking. On October 16, Joe Kennedy wrote to Roosevelt asking to be relieved of his post. Within the week, the President had the matter totally under control. Nine days before the 1940 election he had the Kennedys to Sunday dinner at the White House. By Tuesday, Joseph Kennedy was speaking on nationwide radio to give the Democratic ticket what many consider the most effective boost of the campaign. “On Sunday, I returned from war-torn Europe to the peaceful shores of our beloved country renewed in my conviction that this country must and will stay out of war.”

  The Democratic National Committee ran a newspaper ad declaring that this “one simple, sincere statement by Ambassador Joe Kennedy smashed into smithereens [Republican candidate] Wendell Willkie’s brutal charge that President Roosevelt is planning to send our boys to London.”

  One thing was clear enough. Joe Kennedy did not experience a Saint Paul–style conversion on the big question of America’s role in Europe. He had little respect for the British, little interest in the anti-Nazi cause and no love for the President determined to bring the United States into the war.

  What was it, then?

  The ambassador, as Roosevelt knew, held the highest political ambitions for his oldest son, Joseph Junior. The younger Kennedy had served several months earlier as a delegate to the Democratic national convention, pledged not to FDR but to James A. Farley, Roosevelt’s most serious challenger. His career was to be the bargaining chip. Sixteen years later, Kennedy Senior would smile triumphantly to his Republican friend Clare Booth Luce and say, “I simply made a deal with Roosevelt. We agreed that if I endorsed him for president in 1940, then he would support my son Joe for governor of Massachusetts in 1942.”

  FDR’s son James described the Roosevelt–Kennedy summit in hardball terms. According to him, his father laid it on the line: the President would be only too glad to help the young Kennedys get ahead in politics, but for the ambassador to desert the national ticket would be to ruin those boys’ careers before they had begun. Great salesman that he was, FDR had found the unique selling point. As it turned out, of course, Joe Senior was never able to collect on the debt. His oldest son went to war as a pilot and was killed in a courageous bombing raid over Europe.

  Three decades later, another Kennedy was taught a similar lesson in pressure-point salesmanship. As Senate majority whip, Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts was the second-ranking Democrat in the Senate. In December 1970 he was up for reelection to that post. He had an unexpected challenger, Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia.

  As surprising as it seems, the issue was not Chappaquiddick, the incident two years earlier in which a woman had died in a car driven by Kennedy. The contest focused instead on intramural issues. It pitted the heir to Camelot against a classic political retailer.

  At home in West Virginia, Robert Byrd dutifully played the fiddle at country fairs. In D.C. he had a reputation that was every bit as solicitous. No chore was too small if a fellow senator needed to have it done. As one former colleague put it, “If you took out a pencil, he’d sharpen it.”

  And the job of party whip in the Senate resembles that of a shop steward on the factory floor. This person looks out for the members’ endlessly developing problems and interests. If they need to have the schedule changed because of an important event back home, it is the whip’s job to
see whether something can be done. If a senator cares about an appropriation for a highway through his state, the whip lets him know when the matter is being discussed on the floor so that he can be sure to be there.

  Kennedy’s strengths and notion of the job were very different from Byrd’s. As a political celebrity, the Senator from Massachusetts saw the whip’s job in thematic terms. It was a soapbox for him to speak out on the major issues of the day, giving Jack and Robert Kennedy’s brother yet another forum for his wholesale brand of politics.

  Byrd’s appeal was more street-level. At the time, he held the Senate’s third-ranking position, secretary of the Democratic Conference. Whenever Kennedy went out into the country to give a speech, Byrd assured him there was nothing to worry about back at the office. Kennedy could count on him to handle the details, the scut work too unimportant to command a great man’s attention.

  Faced with a choice between a party spokesman and a shop steward, the members of the Senate chose the latter. To the country’s astonishment, they thrust Robert Byrd past the heir to the country’s preeminent dynasty. Apparently, most Democratic senators like to have their pencils sharpened.

  The most vilified figure in modern American politics used a similar tactic in gaining the treasure he prized most.

  Few recognize that Senator Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin held the nation so long under his spell mainly through his understanding of the press. McCarthy knew what time reporters had to file, he knew the pressures they worked under and he exploited that knowledge as no one had ever done before.